Читать книгу Folded Hills - Stewart Edward White - Страница 16

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Andy began to take Djo horseback-riding before the latter could walk. Most of the time he held the infant before him in the saddle; but occasionally, when he had other occupation for his hands, he attached the child to the crupper behind him by means of a snap and ring. It might dangle; but it could not fall. As a matter of fact, it did very little dangling. In some instinctive monkey fashion it learned almost at once to cling like a limpet to a rock, with its legs stretched wide across the barrel of the horse. Carmel, and Vicenta even more vehemently protested at first. But Andy was unexpectedly firm.

“No,” said he, “Djo is not too young; and the bouncing is not going to hurt him.”

“What does a man know of young children?” demanded Vicenta vigorously.

Andy turned and looked at her gravely in silence. Vicenta knew this look and subsided.

“I know a great deal,” he said after a time. “I have watched the children of the Blackfeet, and I know that what I am saying is so.”

“Los indios!” snorted Vicenta. “Do you consider your son as an Indian?”

“I should like to think that he will be as good a man—in many ways,” said Andy gravely. “But I should hate to think a son of mine could not do what an Indian child can do,” he stated the case the other way around.

Andy was surprising that way. He brought over several bits of Blackfoot lore as to babies, which he calmly applied to Djo. Djo was never known to cry after his third or fourth week, even when hurt or disappointed or enraged. Andy had trained him by the simple expedient of placing the flat of his hand across the infant’s mouth whenever the latter began to cry, and holding it thus until all symptoms had subsided. Even the embryonic mind early recognizes absolute futility. That was the very beginning of Djo’s education: and it worked so well and so promptly that Andy’s imagination kindled. He looked ahead through the years. He took out and examined with renewed interest his old-time mountain skills and knowledges, and dusted them off, for soon Djo would be old enough to learn. Andy began to look forward eagerly to the time when he and Djo could slip off together in the hills—with the old Boone gun. Suddenly Andy was appalled at the thought of how much there was to learn, forgetting the child’s gift of perceptive access to race wisdom which we call instinct. Later when that gift was in full play he was to be proud and delighted.

“He takes to it like a duck to water!” he bragged to anyone who would listen.

Exactly like a duck to water, or a bird untaught to the intricate weaving of its first nest. But he found no one on the rancho to deny that this was the most remarkable child that ever existed.

One thing this arousing of Andy’s imagination did effect. It shook him out of a certain easy routine into which he was unconsciously falling, in spite of his experimental gropings toward innovation. He took the Boone gun from its pegs on the wall and climbed with it to the bare high peaks where the fat bucks were hardening their horns. He began again to exercise his faculties, noting the small matters of the open—the tracks and signs and little indications and from them reading the history of the day. He discovered, to his chagrin, that he had to a certain extent lost the fine edge of skill in matters for which he had been famous in the past. He brushed up on them; he practised. They had fallen below the level of his interest for the simple reason that in this new life he was living he had had no practical use for them. Now again he had a vital use for them: he must teach them to Djo: and therefore they became interesting again. He even hunted up the old balanced knife of his trapping days and regained the deadly accuracy of its cast. He gave no thought to the practical application of many of these things. It would seem unlikely that Djo would ever find occasion to use them. That was not the question. Djo was to be as good a man as his father. Better. Andy turned from a survey of his own attainments to his deficiencies. He read the two books that Larkin had lent him, and which he had from day to day postponed. He enjoyed the romances amazingly; but their final effect was disconcerting in that they opened to him glimpses of a world whose existence he had never even suspected. Andy’s education was slight. He sent a man on horseback to Monterey, returning the books, and bearing a letter to Larkin, asking the loan of others.

“If you got any that tells about things,” he wrote in his sprawling unformed hand, “pleese send me those. I will take good care of them. I mean books that are not made up, but tells about things that really happened.”

Larkin sent him three volumes of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, whose first effect on Andy was merely to appall him for a time with a sense of the vastness of the unknown in human knowledge.